Wednesday, 26 August 2009

Wordy Wednesday

The Arachnoid Wars

Someone sent me one of those spam chain emails the other day. It told the story of a Mexican cactus that a tourist bought, and some time after he got it home, exploded spewing out hundreds of deadly dinner-plate sized tarantulas all over his back garden. A spider had lain eggs inside the cactus which had then grown into these terrifying monsters. At some point they outgrew their home and made a collective bid for freedom.

It even had a picture of a dinner-plate sized taratula on a dinner plate. As if I hadn't been freaked out enough by the story. A quick check on google suggests that this is a hoax. If anyone knows different please do NOT tell me. People who spread terror in this way through our inboxes should be sentenced to spend a month naked in a sealed cell full of hungry tarantulas.

Recently, I have been trying to coexist with several spiders who have taken up residence in my flat. These have very thin legs, almost transparent, and tiny bodies. There was one in my bedroom for several weeks. Until Monday morning. I woke up really early to see a much blacker larger arachnoid grinning up at me. The last time this happened I resorted to boiling water. This time, I calmly got up, took my bedding and alarm clock into the lounge, got my work clothes out of the wardrobe, and went back to sleep on the sofa until it was time to get up.

I didn't see the spider again until late that evening, when it was on a wall in the hall. At which point it got eaten by the vacuum cleaner. The less scary one hasn't been seen since. So it was either devoured by the beast, or it ate one fly too many and morphed into it.

Thus ends my uneasy truce with eight-legged freaks. War has once more been declared.

Incidentally, for those of you who prefer to skip the words on my blog and just look at the pictures, I apologise for the lack of illustrations. By the time I'd trawled the net for spider images, I was freaked out.

Credit Crunch

You know the economy must be in a bad way when an armed bank robberescapes with only €10. When I first saw the headlines, I was worried that the banks were in more trouble than we thought, but it turns out that the robber was incompetent. Economically speaking, this is even worse. It's a bleak day for capatalism when people lose the will to rob one another.

We are currently the hostages of a spider the size of an American quater (Canadian too I guess). It's in our window and lives half inside half outside. We tried vaccuuming it up but the narley thing escaped! Now we can't open the window for fear of death. :o(

Haha I received that tarantula email as well. They say if you've got spiders in your house it is a sign of a healthy climate in your flat. Weird huh? I learned to co-habit with the creatures...only the very hairy ones freak me out. ;o)

I declare jihad on things with more than four legs, more than two eyes and anything with a chitinous exoskeleton. I can't help it. It's how I'm wired. Your spider would have made me scream like a baby.